štúdia:

Discourse and Changes of the Welfare State. Growing research has been focused at uneven willingness of governments to conform to the tenets of global economic competition promulgated by international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. There is also increasing interest in the developments of new members of the European Union, including Slovakia. This study attempts to develop those explanations of the Slovak reform trail-blazing that emphasise the lack of capacity to translate social discontent into credible political opposition. It examines the issue of availability of symbolic resources for opposing the politics of retrenching citizens’ social rights in Slovakia from historical and critical discourse perspective. First, critical discourse analysis (CDA) is introduced as apposite approach to the study of the transfer of political ideas. Its analytical power is demonstrated on the CDA studies of the dynamic of welfare discourse in the United Kingdom and other countries. Secondly, the study presents preliminary analysis of the development of Slovak domestic academic and political discourse on social welfare and social rights. Its main point is that the Slovak welfare reforms were backed up by borrowed phrasal idioms and exploited metaphors that had been already doubted as the only alternative by “Western” academic community. Though the fermentation of social-critical discourse in Slovakia could have been facilitated by this dethronisation, accumulated supplies of arguments were not drawn by Slovak academicians. Further research is necessary to explain why Slovak academicians did not attempt to defend social rights but rather rendered them as the hindrance for the development of democracy.
Sociológia 2008, Vol. 40 (No. 1: 5-34)

Immigration in the United States and the European Union. Helping to Solve the Economic Consequences of Ageing? Most societies of the developed world are ageing rapidly. The number of pensioners has been rising continuously during the past decades. In the future we are facing even bigger rises in the number and share of old (65 +) population while the number of working age (15-64) population will rise only slowly or in many developed countries it is going to stagnate or decline. The old-age dependency ratio (number of older people over 65 relative to the working age population) will rise in all OECD economies posing a critical challenge to public finances. Public pension expenditure as a percent of GDP has risen in the EU-15 from about 6% in 1960 to over 12% in 2000 and on the assumption that no action will be taken to address this situation, pension spending could reach unsustainable levels close to 20% of GDP in the coming decades. The ageing together with the fast improvement of the (mostly very expensive) medical technologies also leads to expanding health-care costs in public budgets. The replacement of the part of working age population through migration could help to reduce the financial burden of ageing. The aim of the paper is to answer the question: is replacement migration a good solution for the EU and America to tackle the rising fiscal expenditure on pensions? Does it help to solve the financial consequences of ageing? If the main goal of the immigration is the economic benefit for the host societies – I think it should be – than migration must have a positive fiscal effect on public budgets. If immigrants pay more to the public budget than they receive from it, the fiscal effect of migration is positive. If the immigrants “pay their way” we can talk about a transfer of wealth from immigrants to natives. In this case immigration helps to reduce the financial burden of ageing. I will argue that during the last two decades in many Western countries the migration lead to more costs then benefits and created more problems than solved. Some EU members – instead of using immigration as a tool to tackle the financial consequences of ageing – were creating their new ethnic underclass. The fiscal impact of immigration is strongly dependent on various factors, notably the state of the labour market, the composition of migrants, the extension of the welfare states and the access of immigrants to welfare benefits. So any immigration reform targeting a positive fiscal balance shall take these factors into consideration.
Sociológia 2008, Vol. 40 (No. 1: 35-61)

Singles; postmodernity; lifestyles; one person household; single parent family

The Analysis of the Singles Phenomenon in Europe and Slovakia. The article deals with sociological, demographical and demogeographical aspects of the singles phenomenon in Europe and in Slovakia. Since issues such as the increasing number of singles, cohabitations, and individualism are being reflected in everyday popular culture, clichés arise depicting the singles as people who are high earning egoists having uninhibited sexual life.
The main aim of the article is to overview the existing definitions of such phenomena since in Slovakia they are not yet conceptually, empirically and critically elaborated. Another aim of the article is to depict general situation in European countries paying special attention to Slovak-specific features. Singles represent and will represent serious structural element of the future demographical change. This is why they enter population forecasting and should be concerned in population policy decisions and family planning.
Sociológia 2008, Vol. 40 (No 1: 62-81)